In many applications there is a need and desire to generate and display three-dimensional images. One area of particular interest is as an aiding tool in surgery and similar applications such as in-vivo diagnosis.
For many years the predominant tools for generating two- and three-dimensional images have been the microscope or/and an ultra-sound instrument. However, the drawback with a microscope is that tissue has to be brought to the microscope thereby making it impossible to perform in-vivo examination. For ultra-sound techniques the drawback is the coarse resolution.
Further, many diseases such as cancer in various forms are best examined at very high resolution. For many years a need existed to provide images with high resolution from within the body. This problem was partially solved by the development of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) technology.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,956,355 and 6,160,826 are examples of systems relying on OCT technology for generating images.
However, there are numerous problems and drawbacks with existing OCT based image-generating systems. In particular the existing systems are unable to generate fast and high accuracy two dimensional scans or three-dimensional images in real time. Thus, whereas it is entirely possible to overlay a number of two-dimensional (2-D) images and thereby form a three-dimensional (3-D) image, such an approach will not generate 3-D images in real time.
Real time 3-D images would be very useful and a powerful tool, for example for assisting in surgery. A number of other application areas exist, such as retina examinations, cancer diagnosis, diagnosis of industrial processes, etc.
Another problem encountered in prior systems is their relatively large size. For example, it is common for a system relying on opto-mechanical components to have a size of more than 10 dm3.